When Apple discontinued Aperture in favor of Photos for OS X—sacrificing most of the features that appealed to Aperture users—the presumed replacement was Adobe’s Lightroom CC. But not all photographers are drawn to Lightroom.

Phase One’s Capture One Pro offers many of the features that Aperture users expect. It’s an organizer that stores, tracks, and remembers information about all of your photos; and it’s also a sophisticated image editor that allows you to make adjustments such as cropping, exposure, and color changes.

]]>http://www.macworld.com/article/2953720/software-photography/capture-one-pro-8-3-review-aperture-replacement-light-on-library-features-strong-on-editing-tools.html#tk.rss_macapps
PhotographyOneNote 2016 for Mac review: Intuitive and versatile, but still not up to par with Windows versionThu, 30 Jul 2015 03:30:00 -0700Jeffery BattersbyJeffery Battersby

It’s been about a year since Microsoft released (and I reviewed) OneNote for Mac, which was, at that time, available only from the Mac App Store. Over the past 14 or so months Microsoft has made numerous incremental changes to the app, adding or updating features and making the app more versatile and, perhaps, making it a better note taking choice than the everpresent Evernote.

]]>http://www.macworld.com/article/2952510/software-productivity/onenote-2016-for-mac-review-intuitive-and-versatile-but-still-not-up-to-par-with-windows-version.html#tk.rss_macapps
ProductivityDart review: Give it time to evolve, and Dart may be the future of emailMon, 27 Jul 2015 05:00:00 -0700Michael SimonMichael Simon

It’s hard to pinpoint when it happened, but email has turned from a modern, convenient form of communication into an awful nuisance. It’s not just spam and unwanted solicitations; without strict attention, emails that actually need to be dealt with will pile up and important ones will inadvertently get pushed to the bottom of your inbox.

What we need is a better way to communicate. Where text messages and tweets encourage short, rapid-fire conversations, emails tend to be lengthier—and therein lies the problem. We put off responding because emails inherently require more time; even when a simple answer is all that’s needed, we tend to labor over what we write.

As I use PowerPoint 2016 for Mac, the word that keeps popping into my head is pleasant. Nearly everything about the massive visual overhaul from the previous version (PowerPoint 2011 for Mac ) seems clearer, friendlier, and more modern. It feels more like Apple’s Keynote, which I mean as a compliment.

The feature changes are mostly minor and subtle yet useful. Even so, PowerPoint 2016 for Mac still lags behind its Windows counterpart—and it also lost a few interesting features that were present in PowerPoint 2011.

]]>http://www.macworld.com/article/2951827/software-productivity/powerpoint-2016-for-mac-review-new-interface-and-features-makes-powerpoint-pleasant.html#tk.rss_macapps
ProductivityOneNote 2016 for Mac review: Intuitive and versatile, but still not up to par with Windows versionThu, 30 Jul 2015 03:30:00 -0700Jeffery BattersbyJeffery Battersby

It’s been about a year since Microsoft released (and I reviewed) OneNote for Mac, which was, at that time, available only from the Mac App Store. Over the past 14 or so months Microsoft has made numerous incremental changes to the app, adding or updating features and making the app more versatile and, perhaps, making it a better note taking choice than the everpresent Evernote.

]]>http://www.macworld.com/article/2952510/software-productivity/onenote-2016-for-mac-review-intuitive-and-versatile-but-still-not-up-to-par-with-windows-version.html#tk.rss_macapps
ProductivityDart review: Give it time to evolve, and Dart may be the future of emailMon, 27 Jul 2015 05:00:00 -0700Michael SimonMichael Simon

It’s hard to pinpoint when it happened, but email has turned from a modern, convenient form of communication into an awful nuisance. It’s not just spam and unwanted solicitations; without strict attention, emails that actually need to be dealt with will pile up and important ones will inadvertently get pushed to the bottom of your inbox.

What we need is a better way to communicate. Where text messages and tweets encourage short, rapid-fire conversations, emails tend to be lengthier—and therein lies the problem. We put off responding because emails inherently require more time; even when a simple answer is all that’s needed, we tend to labor over what we write.

As I use PowerPoint 2016 for Mac, the word that keeps popping into my head is pleasant. Nearly everything about the massive visual overhaul from the previous version (PowerPoint 2011 for Mac ) seems clearer, friendlier, and more modern. It feels more like Apple’s Keynote, which I mean as a compliment.

The feature changes are mostly minor and subtle yet useful. Even so, PowerPoint 2016 for Mac still lags behind its Windows counterpart—and it also lost a few interesting features that were present in PowerPoint 2011.

If you want to quickly assemble a sleek website without too many bells and whistles, RapidWeaver provides an excellent option. If you want to do even more with your site, Rapidweaver can help you there, too—but it’ll cost you a good deal extra.

Not bad for the basics

A freshly installed copy of RapidWeaver 6 feels like a more sophisticated version of Karelia’s friendly, super-simple Sandvox. Both programs allow you to quickly build up the structure of your site in a left-hand navigation menu, selecting from a variety of different page types including contact forms, blogs, and photo galleries. Both build in FTP capabilities, so that you can create and upload your site without switching to another program. And both offer a wide selection of premade themes to apply to your content.

It doesn’t matter that you don’t think Microsoft Word doesn’t matter anymore. It does—for tens, hundreds, thousands of people, Microsoft Word is an every day event. An indispensable tool for getting daily business done. And without it, whether you like it or not, much of what must get done in the world of words wouldn’t, if it weren’t for Word.

What matters most to those users is how it works. Whether it works well. Whether it will get the job done without getting in the way. What matters to the hundreds of thousands of people who’ve traded up from a PC to a Mac and the tens of thousands of IT professionals who have to support them is whether or not Word on the Mac works in the world they work in. Is it invisible. Seamless. Unbroken.

With the untimely demise of iPhoto earlier this year, Apple appears to have finally abandoned the last vestiges of the iLife concept introduced in 2002, leaving iMovie and GarageBand as the sole remnants of a once-great legacy of whimsical creative applications for average folks.

Many third-party developers are keeping this storied tradition alive in an unofficial capacity with spiritual successors to iLife, treading new ground with inspired Mac software that retains the familiar, user-friendly look and feel of Cupertino’s classic consumer software.

Creative cornucopia

Picture Collage Maker 3 borrows heavily from the iLife-iWork user interface playbook, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Anyone who’s used an Apple-made creative app over the last decade or so will feel instantly at home here, and more than 140 included templates (and 130+ others that can be downloaded after installation) make it easy to produce great results with minimal effort.

Non-experts welcome

Once you’ve chosen from Sandvox’s plethora of premade designs, it’s a snap to customize headlines, text, and sidebars, drop in images, and create new pages. After watching a quick intro video, it took me less than an hour to knock together a simple site with a nice-looking photo gallery and a basic blog.

The best solutions are often the simplest. Time after time, Apple has unveiled revolutionary new input methods that seem obvious in retrospect but are ingenious in their simplicity; things like the mouse, the click wheel, and multitouch are so deceptively simple they have instantly changed the way we approach the respective interfaces they control, bringing faster and more efficient interactions with the various elements on the screen.

That’s precisely why menu bar apps are my favorite kind of utility. Over the years I’ve probably used hundreds of them, and as you can see in the screenshots below, there are no less than a dozen of them at the top of my screen at any given time (not counting the ones Apple lets me put there). Their beauty lies in their innate simplicity, putting important bits of information and controls in my line of sight and cutting down on the time I need to spend navigating complex interfaces.

Apple turned its back on optical media years ago. But many Mac owners still rely on those once ubiquitous shiny round CDs or DVDs for backups, transferring larger files, or sharing home videos with friends and family not yet hip to web streaming.

Although Apple and others offer the external hardware necessary to read and write discs, good software capable of more than basic burning capabilities remains elusive. (Forget the Mac App Store, it’s mostly a wasteland of multiple apps with the same clunky user interface sold under different names.) Roxio hasn’t abandoned OS X yet, although recent versions have become something of a Frankenstein’s monster stitched together from various pieces and parts.

]]>http://www.macworld.com/article/2945192/roxio-toast-14-pro-review-a-mixed-bag-of-multimedia-creation-software.html#tk.rss_macapps
VideoOneNote 2016 for Mac review: Intuitive and versatile, but still not up to par with Windows versionThu, 30 Jul 2015 03:30:00 -0700Jeffery BattersbyJeffery Battersby

It’s been about a year since Microsoft released (and I reviewed) OneNote for Mac, which was, at that time, available only from the Mac App Store. Over the past 14 or so months Microsoft has made numerous incremental changes to the app, adding or updating features and making the app more versatile and, perhaps, making it a better note taking choice than the everpresent Evernote.

]]>http://www.macworld.com/article/2952510/software-productivity/onenote-2016-for-mac-review-intuitive-and-versatile-but-still-not-up-to-par-with-windows-version.html#tk.rss_macapps
ProductivityDart review: Give it time to evolve, and Dart may be the future of emailMon, 27 Jul 2015 05:00:00 -0700Michael SimonMichael Simon

It’s hard to pinpoint when it happened, but email has turned from a modern, convenient form of communication into an awful nuisance. It’s not just spam and unwanted solicitations; without strict attention, emails that actually need to be dealt with will pile up and important ones will inadvertently get pushed to the bottom of your inbox.

What we need is a better way to communicate. Where text messages and tweets encourage short, rapid-fire conversations, emails tend to be lengthier—and therein lies the problem. We put off responding because emails inherently require more time; even when a simple answer is all that’s needed, we tend to labor over what we write.

As I use PowerPoint 2016 for Mac, the word that keeps popping into my head is pleasant. Nearly everything about the massive visual overhaul from the previous version (PowerPoint 2011 for Mac ) seems clearer, friendlier, and more modern. It feels more like Apple’s Keynote, which I mean as a compliment.

The feature changes are mostly minor and subtle yet useful. Even so, PowerPoint 2016 for Mac still lags behind its Windows counterpart—and it also lost a few interesting features that were present in PowerPoint 2011.

If you want to quickly assemble a sleek website without too many bells and whistles, RapidWeaver provides an excellent option. If you want to do even more with your site, Rapidweaver can help you there, too—but it’ll cost you a good deal extra.

Not bad for the basics

A freshly installed copy of RapidWeaver 6 feels like a more sophisticated version of Karelia’s friendly, super-simple Sandvox. Both programs allow you to quickly build up the structure of your site in a left-hand navigation menu, selecting from a variety of different page types including contact forms, blogs, and photo galleries. Both build in FTP capabilities, so that you can create and upload your site without switching to another program. And both offer a wide selection of premade themes to apply to your content.

It doesn’t matter that you don’t think Microsoft Word doesn’t matter anymore. It does—for tens, hundreds, thousands of people, Microsoft Word is an every day event. An indispensable tool for getting daily business done. And without it, whether you like it or not, much of what must get done in the world of words wouldn’t, if it weren’t for Word.

What matters most to those users is how it works. Whether it works well. Whether it will get the job done without getting in the way. What matters to the hundreds of thousands of people who’ve traded up from a PC to a Mac and the tens of thousands of IT professionals who have to support them is whether or not Word on the Mac works in the world they work in. Is it invisible. Seamless. Unbroken.

With the untimely demise of iPhoto earlier this year, Apple appears to have finally abandoned the last vestiges of the iLife concept introduced in 2002, leaving iMovie and GarageBand as the sole remnants of a once-great legacy of whimsical creative applications for average folks.

Many third-party developers are keeping this storied tradition alive in an unofficial capacity with spiritual successors to iLife, treading new ground with inspired Mac software that retains the familiar, user-friendly look and feel of Cupertino’s classic consumer software.

Creative cornucopia

Picture Collage Maker 3 borrows heavily from the iLife-iWork user interface playbook, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Anyone who’s used an Apple-made creative app over the last decade or so will feel instantly at home here, and more than 140 included templates (and 130+ others that can be downloaded after installation) make it easy to produce great results with minimal effort.

Non-experts welcome

Once you’ve chosen from Sandvox’s plethora of premade designs, it’s a snap to customize headlines, text, and sidebars, drop in images, and create new pages. After watching a quick intro video, it took me less than an hour to knock together a simple site with a nice-looking photo gallery and a basic blog.

The best solutions are often the simplest. Time after time, Apple has unveiled revolutionary new input methods that seem obvious in retrospect but are ingenious in their simplicity; things like the mouse, the click wheel, and multitouch are so deceptively simple they have instantly changed the way we approach the respective interfaces they control, bringing faster and more efficient interactions with the various elements on the screen.

That’s precisely why menu bar apps are my favorite kind of utility. Over the years I’ve probably used hundreds of them, and as you can see in the screenshots below, there are no less than a dozen of them at the top of my screen at any given time (not counting the ones Apple lets me put there). Their beauty lies in their innate simplicity, putting important bits of information and controls in my line of sight and cutting down on the time I need to spend navigating complex interfaces.

]]>http://www.macworld.com/article/2946568/gestimer-review-mac-menu-bar-timer-like-youve-never-used-before.html#tk.rss_macapps
Utility SoftwareHow to set up family sharing in PhotosFri, 29 May 2015 03:31:00 -0700Lesa SniderLesa Snider

If more than one Mac- or iOS device-using person lives under your roof—or if you share your Mac with one or more people—using Photos in a family situation can be a complicated affair. Because you can’t share Photos libraries across a network, you quickly end up with multiple libraries (one for each Mac user account) and nobody remembers which pictures live where. It’s a nightmare; but fortunately, Apple has a solution.

As we talked about in last week’s Working Mac, you may have been led to believe that you don’t have to worry about computer viruses on your Mac. And, to some extent, there’s truth to that. While your Mac can definitely be infected with malware, Apple’s built-in malware detection and file quarantine capabilities are meant to make it less likely that you’ll download and run malicious software.

Apple introduced malware detection to the Mac OS with Snow Leopard (Mac OS 10.6). This system consists of the quarantine of any app downloaded from the Internet, the use of Code Signing certificates to verify that an app is coming from a legit source, and regular security updates that include databases of known malware targeting the Mac OS.

Small office, large office, home office, school, home user... unless you're in IT it's unlikely you've given much thought to setting up Apple's Server app. In fact, maybe even if you're in IT you haven't given it much thought because, well, why? You're already running Windows servers, right?

With the proliferation of Mac and iOS devices in every corner of your home and office, you may have no idea just how much of your Internet bandwidth is being used to download content from Apple's servers. A caching server can help you make sure all your devices are up to date while leaving your Internet bandwidth almost untouched.

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ServersOS XThe power of Pomodoro (or, how to slice your time to stay on task)Wed, 06 May 2015 03:00:00 -0700Jeffery BattersbyJeffery Battersby

If there is a single conundrum of working with technology it’s how to stay on task with so many little distractions vying for your attention. How to stay focused? Well, it may be as simple as turning off notifications, trimming open apps down to only those required to get your job done, and keeping a timer ticking in the background to help keep you on task.

To be clear, I’m not one of those “Getting-Things-Done-inBox-Zero-Make-A-List-And-Don’t-Let-Go-Until-It’s-Done” kind of folks. But, sometimes I do need a simple tool to help kickstart my focus, particularly at the beginning of a project. For that, I use a timer.

There is a wide variety of Pomodoro timers in the App Store. You should be able to find one to your liking.